Staff Backend Engineer

Wealthfront; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 208,000 - 228,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, vision, and dental benefits

401K plan

Generous time off

Job summary

A technology-driven financial service firm in Palo Alto is seeking a Backend Engineer. This role requires 6+ years of experience in backend development, preferably in Java, and a strong understanding of distributed systems. Responsibilities include designing new features, improving existing systems, and ensuring stability in production. The firm offers a competitive salary range of $208,000 - $228,000 USD, along with equity and benefits such as medical, dental, and professional development support.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in developing backend components, services or APIs.
• Demonstrated knowledge of distributed systems and functional programming paradigms.
• Experience with online data stores such as MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL.

Responsibilities

• Design and build new features or enhancements to existing backend systems.
• Improve maintainability and stability of the codebase.
• Ensure backend systems operate smoothly in production.

Skills

Backend development in Java

Distributed systems

SQL knowledge

Agile development

Test-driven development

Education

BS or MS in computer science or related field

Tools

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Spark

Job description

Overview

Wealthfront’s culture centers around continuous learning, innovation, and quality-driven software development. With high quality software as our ultimate engineering objective, our key tactic is automation. Wealthfront engineers function as builder/operators, with dual responsibility for building the system and operating it in production. This investment in automation is expected, and the prioritization of it is always built into our planning and execution. Engineers automate our development processes and observability to ensure systems are healthy and maintainable. We are seeking engineers who want to have outsized impact in a company of our size (~350 employees, half in engineering).

Responsibilities

• Work with a team of engineers to design and build new features or enhancements to existing features. This work will add capabilities to backend systems and services, with automated instrumentation and monitoring to require minimal operational maintenance.
• Help improve the maintainability and stability of the codebase by fixing issues and adding necessary enhancements to existing backend systems.
• Ensure mission-critical backend systems and services operate smoothly in production by triaging and resolving operational issues as part of a team of on-call engineers.
• Proactively identify opportunities for improving the reliability and scalability of our systems.
• Participate in recruiting activities such as interviewing and attending career fairs.
• Provide mentorship to other engineers on the team.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in developing backend components, services or APIs in Java or a similar language.
• Demonstrated knowledge and understanding of distributed systems and functional programming paradigms.
• Knowledge of SQL and experience working with online data stores (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server).
• Passion for agile, test-driven development, continuous integration and automated testing; interest in platforms and backend systems with measurable business impact; ability to thrive in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.
• Nice-to-have: experience with Spark pipelines; knowledge of an ORM (e.g., Hibernate); exposure to a dependency injection framework (e.g., Guice, Spring, Pico, Dagger).
• Educational requirement: BS or MS in computer science or related field.

What Wealthfront Will Offer

• Mentorship through a structured onboarding program.
• Opportunities to work on projects aligned with your professional goals.
• Professional development support with feedback during weekly 1:1s and semi-annual reviews.
• Autonomy to help you be a happy and successful member of our team.

Estimated annual salary range: $208,000 - $228,000 USD plus equity and a discretionary bonus.

Benefits include medical, vision, dental, 401K plan, generous time off, parental leave, wellness reimbursements, professional development, employee investing discount, and more.